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Securing Disunion: young people’s nationalism, identities and (in)securities in the campaign for an independent Scotland

Botterill, Kate; Hopkins, Peter; Sanghera, Gurchathen; Arshad, Rowena

Authors

Kate Botterill

Peter Hopkins

Gurchathen Sanghera

Rowena Arshad



Abstract

This paper explores ethnic and religious minority youth perspectives of security and nationalism in Scotland during the independence campaign in 2014. We discuss how young people co-construct narratives of Scottish nationalism alongside minority ethnic and faith identities in order to feel secure. By critically combining literatures from feminist geopolitics, international relations (IR) and children’s emotional geographies, we employ the concept of ‘ontological security’. The paper departs from state-centric approaches to security to explore the relational entanglements between geopolitical discourses and the ontological security of young people living through a moment of political change. We examine how everyday encounters with difference can reflect broader geopolitical narratives of security and insecurity, which subsequently trouble notions of ‘multicultural nationalism’ in Scotland and demonstrate ways that youth ‘securitize the self’ (Kinnvall, 2004). The paper responds to calls for empirical analyses of youth perspectives on nationalism and security (Benwell, 2016) and on the nexus between security and emotional subjectivity in critical geopolitics (Pain, 2009; Shaw et al., 2014). Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), this paper draws on focus group and interview data from 382 ethnic and religious minority young people in Scotland collected over the 12-month period of the campaign.

Citation

Botterill, K., Hopkins, P., Sanghera, G., & Arshad, R. (2016). Securing Disunion: young people’s nationalism, identities and (in)securities in the campaign for an independent Scotland. Political Geography, 55, 124-134. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2016.09.002

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Sep 4, 2016
Online Publication Date Sep 20, 2016
Publication Date 2016-11
Deposit Date Sep 7, 2016
Publicly Available Date Mar 29, 2024
Journal Political Geography
Print ISSN 0962-6298
Publisher Elsevier
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 55
Pages 124-134
DOI https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2016.09.002
Keywords nationalism, young people, race and ethnicity, ontological security, everyday geopolitics,
Public URL http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/375411
Related Public URLs http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/10448/

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Copyright Statement
This article is maintained by: Elsevier; Article Title: Securing disunion: Young people's nationalism, identities and (in)securities in the campaign for an independent Scotland; Journal Title: Political Geography; CrossRef DOI link to publisher maintained version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2016.09.002; Content Type: article; Copyright: © 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.







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